A first look at Metasploit

A first look at Metasploit

Metasploit is the leading open source security penetration testing system in use today. It was originally created by HD Moore during 2003 in Perl, but has since been ported to Ruby and now stands as one of the biggest Ruby-based systems around.

To give you a flavour of what Metasploit can do, here is an example video where the attacker (using a Mac) uses a known exploit in Adobe Reader under Windows XP to install a keylogger and screen capture spyware on the victim's machine, all carried out remotely:

The tutorial detailing the steps carried out in the above video can be found here:

I have been writing about web technology and software development since 2001. I am the developer of the Alpha Framework for PHP, and the five.today personal productivity app. I love open source, technology, and economics.